FROM MEXICO WITH LOVE: El ojo del tigre!

FROM MEXICO WITH LOVE
Starring Kuno Becker, Steven Bauer, Stephen Lang
Directed by Jimmy Nickerson
Lionsgate
Review by Louis Fowler

I don't like sports. Never have, probably never will. Everytime I've ever been in the bleachers at, say, a football game, I always feel like it's one step away from a Nuremberg Rally, only these Nazis are far more simplistic degenerates, entire bodies mindlessly painted in orange and blue. I don't see how “rooting” for a bunch of shaved apes chasing a ball around in a homoerotic contest of wills is entertaining. Sorry. I'm a fat jerk, I know. Here's my underwear, I'm ready for my wedgie.

But, given that info, I gotta admit that I love sports movies. That's kinda weird, right? For example, I hate high school football, but will watch FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS over and over again. I have never even seen a boxing match, but the ROCKY flicks will always be in my all-time top 25. And don't even get me started with my obsessive love of STROKER ACE, just know that I'll “stand on it” everytime.

That being said, FROM MEXICO WITH LOVE is my new second favorite Latino boxing movie—the first is still THE PRICE OF GLORY, starring Jimmy Smits—but second place ain't so bad, right? It's how you play the game, right guys?

While, as a Mexican myself, I'd rather see a movie about a Hispanic migrant worker going to school and making something of himself, becoming a doctor, maybe, we have to take what we can get and just be happy that, for once, we're not relegated to the side-role of a sassy cleaning-lady or bald multi-tatted gang-banger. FROM MEXICO is a, thankfully, positive film about Hector, a scrappy migrant farm-worker who wants to become a prizefighter, but can't really ever commit due to his sick mother and her constant need for expensive medicines. He's got a bit of a chip on his shoulder and this doesn't help when, after a run-in with the snotty white land-owners, lands him back across the border. Mom dies, freeing up his sched, allowing for him to train full-time to take on, I'll be darned, the snotty white land-owner's frat-boy date-rapist son! Viva la Raza and vaya con Dios!

Is FROM MEXICO WITH LOVE predicable? Of course, and that's why I loved it so much. You know that Hector is gonna win the big match, but, still, that sense of fear that he might lose wells through you because you so desperately want him to win. He deserves to win. Far too many times in sports movies these days they have the guys that you've sided with for two hours lose the big game, usually to make some sort of point about the “beauty of the game”. Fuck that! I want my team to win! I want my guys to kick the asses of the other guys! Where's that orange and blue body-paint???

So, I guess the big question is this: why can I root for fictional athletes but so easily spit on real-life ones? I think it's because I get to see the complete journey of the character, the underdog making good. He's a real hero, someone with virtue that plays fair, fights to the finish and everything else in a Survivor song. That doesn't happen in real-life. Real athletes are spoiled imbeciles snorting coke off a stripper's pubic mound while just waiting to get capped in the parking lot of a night-club. You can't “believe” in real people anymore. Wasn't it a “real” athlete who proudly boasted that he's no role model a few years back? Isn't that the new rallying cry of these overpaid assholes?

Sports heroes? Only in fiction, hombre. Only in fiction...